1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to EJB, or Enterprise JavaBean (registered trademark) technology, and more specifically, the persistence of EJB components in a directory accessed via LDAP in a computer system.
2. Description of related Art
EJB technology defines an architecture for deploying and executing distributed applications. The purpose of the specification of this architecture is to facilitate and standardize the development, deployment and assembly in computer platforms of applicative software components known as EJB components. EJB components are portable, transaction-oriented, protected, multi-user, and database-oriented. They are not only independent from the machine in which they are installed and its operating system, but also from the platform to which said machine belongs.
LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) technology is currently an open standard defining a method for accessing and updating data in a distributed directory service. Throughout the following description, an EJB component is persistent when its state is saved in a storage means. Currently, the only storage means supported in the EJB specifications for the persistence of EJB components is a relational database, accessed through the standard interfaces JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) and JSQL (Java SQL). The specification of EJB technology does not include the capability to make EJB components persistent in a directory accessed via LDAP.
One object of the present invention consists of ensuring the persistence of EJB components in a directory accessed via LDAP.
Another object of the present invention is to ensure persistence in a way that is flexible enough to adapt to various LDAP schemas.
In this context, the present invention proposes a method for managing the persistence of EJB components integrated into an EJB server of a computer system, characterized in that it consists of managing persistence in a directory accessed via LDAP by mapping and adapting an entity EJB component to a given type of LDAP entry in a given directory.
The present invention also relates to the computer system comprising at least one client, at least one EJB server comprising EJB components, and at least one directory accessed via LDAP composed of LDAP entries, characterized in that it includes means for mapping and adapting an entity EJB component to a given type of LDAP entry in a given directory.